OK, one of my readers “John” (thanks John!) shared a link to an unsupported patch that fixed the Ubuntu 7.04’s mouse under Virtual PC. Let me give you the quick summary of what I did:

Fired up a new VirtualPC with the Fiesty Fawn “Live CD” in the drive. Booted up in safe graphics mode.

Once up, I activated the keyboard mouse using the fix I described in my post “Ubuntu 7.04 and Virtual PC 2007 – Mouse Issue Workaround (sort of)” at http://shrinkster.com/p2u.

I then installed Ubuntu, it was pretty straightforward although a bit annoying using the numeric keypad as a mouse. One hint, sometimes it didn’t recognize my mouse click until I moved the mouse off a button then back on.

After the install I rebooted, then in my new install repeated step 2 to activate the keyboard mouse in my new install. Setting this in the Live CD didn’t carry over to the new install.

Joe Soroka has posted a script, I downloaded it using the “shell script” link at the very top of the message and saved it to my home folder.

I opened my File Browser (use Left Alt+F1 select Places, Home Folder). I moved the mouse (again using the numeric keypad) and clicked once on the sh file I’d saved.

Now in the browser, with the file highlighted, hit left alt+enter or select File, Properties on the File Browser menu.

In the dialog that appears, move to the Permissions tab, and check on the box that says “Allow executing file as program”. Click the close button to close the dialog.

Now double click the sh file or press enter. You should see a dialog appear that asks if you want to open in a text editor or run the script. Select the “run in terminal” option. (Update, added “in terminal” based on feedback.)

While the script executes it will ask for your admin password, give it.

At one point it will also stop to ask if you want to skip or configure grub manually, or let it do it for you. I pressed enter to let the script do it for me.

That ended the app, when the terminal window closed I rebooted (still using the numeric keypad as my mouse).

When Ubuntu came back up, it flashed a quick message from the grub asking which kernel I wanted to load, I just took the default.

I logged in and what do you know, my mouse worked!

Just FYI, I’m running Virutal PC 2007 under Vista, using the standard desktop version of Ubuntu 7.04.

The real hero here is Joe Soroka for posting such a simple fix. I encourage you to give it a try. If you are concerned about messing up your Ubuntu install, simply copy the VHD/VPC files to a backup location before running the fix.

A big thanks to Joe Soroka, and to “John” for posting the link. Now I can actually start playing with Ubuntu 7.04.

(the above is just useful for copying the link – and great fun to watch virtual pc’s method of pasting)

> Step 10 should say to select the Run In Terminal option as Run does not seem to do anything
> Also, as an alternative to parts of steps 6 and 7, it is probaly easier to save to the desktop so you don’t have to open a seperate file browser

I worked fine for me, with VPC2007 on Vista32. Only problem was, because I got sick of using the keypad as a mouse really quick, I had no patience to figure out why my network wasn’t up. I used the trick to paste from the host. You have to wait for VPC to enter the entire script, one character at a time. That takes several minutes. Then you will probably have to enter your own carriage returns and tabs to make the script identical to the one displayed on the page from which you download the script. Once again though, it worked fine the first time! Oh yeah, and do select the “Run in Terminal” option for step 10, because the “Run” button does nothing at all.

Thanks for the feedback, I updated the instructions with the “in terminal” text. Glad it worked for you.

On the network issue, I had some as well when I was at work, although not at home. To fix while at work I set VPC to use “Shared Networking (NAT)” option under Networking.

I then clicked on the network icon in the upper right area of the bar (near the clock) and picked “wired”. Ubuntu refreshed itself and connected to the internet.

You may or may not have to do this, as I said when I got home that night Ubuntu connected to the internet with no problems, so I guess it’s something in the way the connections are setup externally to VPC/Ubuntu.

John again. This morning my Ubuntu upgraded itself to 2.6.20-16, which killed the mouse. I had to reboot to the 2.6.20-15 patched version. I do not know linux well enough to know where to patch -16, although it would be nice of somebody to fix the source.

As John reported above upgrading to 2.6.20-16 breaks the mouse again – does anyone have a fix for this yet? Is this likely to be fixed properly any time soon or have PS/2 mice been written off as unsupported?

Thank you for the mouse fix. I had been using Hoary hedgehog in Virtual PC, finally decided to upgrade, didn’t know about this mouse issue. Awesome that you have this not-too-difficult fix for us! I hope the ubuntu folks are paying attention and stick this into the next build(s).

I should have mentioned that Hoary is v 5.04, and installed very easy, and everything (network, mouse, etc.) just worked without problem in Virtual PC. So I expected the same for 7.04. Both network and mouse took some effort to get going, but now it is working fine. Thanks again.

Hi all.. i’m running Ubuntu 7.04 in Ms Virtual server and have same mouse problem. But, if I connect using VNC, my mouse work perfectly fine. I hope this help you in using the mouse to fix the mouse issue 😉

Currently upgrading to 7.10. willl try the patch later . should work. Only issue I observed is the CPU utilizaton goes higher. Not an issue if you have a fast one like Intel core2duo e6750.

Ooops.. btw mine was a working linux migrated to virtual server…and remote desktop was enabled. In case of installing a new one, the remote desktop will be still disabled. so..not pretty useful. I have tried editing grub. Will let you know once I restart.

This worked for me and it also cured my graphics problem. In normal mode graphics were corrupt, in safe mode everything was too big so I couldn’t see the whole screen.
This is in MS VPC2007 under a Vista x64 host.